1) announces that it will equip itself with a real central bank (a lender of last resort) that takes all risk of sovereign default off the table — with conviction and overwhelming force, with no ifs and buts, and no ambushes from the Bundesbank.

2) announces EMU debt-pooling, fiscal union, a joint EMU budget and tax system, and an EMU government as a counterpart for the enhanced the ECB … Yes, this means rewriting the German constitution, and in effect means the abolition of Germany as a functioning sovereign nation. – UK Telegraph (5/16/12)

Analysis: Lagarde’s next battle at IMF: power shift … When Lagarde passed around the hat among finance ministers last week to raise funds to contain the euro zone’s debt crisis, China, India, Brazil and Russia said they would be part of the effort but chose not to announce each of their contributions until a June summit of the Group of 20 leading economies.

Europe may have to yield something in return. The crisis in Europe and a fragile recovery from recession in the United States has hastened the shift in world economic power towards the emerging markets, and they want their growing heft to be reflected in finance institutions like the IMF. – Reuters (4/23/2012)

The trap created by the old men who run Europe – and want to run the world – is about to close.

Either the EU turns into a “real country” or chaos, starvation and depression shall result. This is what they want us to understand anyway.

We can see the choices spelled out quite clearly in the above articles. In the first one, we see that the EU must create a real central bank, a real tax system, a real budget … a real government, in fact, or there will be overwhelming chaos and “anarchy.”

The second article, above, reveals a still-larger elite strategy – which is apparently to gradually bankrupt the West while raising up the developing world.

Given what may be an upcoming worldwide depression, all parts of the globe shall likely suffer equally. But nonetheless, it is the plan over time of those who run globalist facilities such as the IMF to use various economic crises as a way to continually centralize power and authority.

Europe and America have not recovered from the “crisis” of 2008, nor shall they, probably, for years. The global misalignment of resources, businesses and money remains in force. The top elites have refused to put their failing banks out of business and the world cannot recover until this biggest-bubble-ever has been lanced.

The elites know this, but they provide, nonetheless, a different rhetoric. There are companies that are “too big to fail” they explain. This almost guarantees there will be no recovery in the short term. It continues to be impossible to know which companies are healthy and which are not.

In fact … the global elites likely want – seek and crave – a global depression. They seek global governance; a global money; a global central bank.

This was surely the plan all along. The EU was built up through subterfuge and trickery – and its current situation was carefully planned as well. No, it is no accident.

There were very few central banks at the beginning of the 20th century – today there are something like 150. The world’s economy is perpetually unstable.

Central bank monopoly printing of money gives rise to booms and then busts. During the bust phase, those who control central banking amass greater and greater power.

Put a region, a polity – a presumptive country – into play and let the central banking power-mechanism grind it up. Sooner or later the centralizing elements shall win out as monopoly fiat money bankrupts those who wish to resist, or have different ideas.

Monopoly paper money is merciless. The elites know they simply need to wait. And they do.

The EU was sold as a trade union, but it was no such thing. All along it was planned to be a fully functioning state with a flag, an anthem and an army. Brussels is to be the head of this new nation and the scheme is to rule by regulatory fiat.

This is actually a blueprint for other unions around the world. There is an Asian Union, as well, an African Union and a South American Union. Some are more advanced than others.

There is also a plan to build a “North American Union” constructed of Mexico, Canada and the United States. This has been denied by the powers-that-be – but then they denied plans for a EU super state as well.

Now the trap is closing. The calls by the bought-and-paid-for media for a “real” super state are growing stronger. Alternatively, it is said there will be chaos, panic, bank-runs, devaluations, starvation and anarchy.

This is the dialectic as the elites wish to frame it. But it is a false one.

There will likely be chaos no matter what. It is the preferred tool. If Greece leaves the EU, then the resultant financial and banking ruin shall be used as justification for further centralizations of power within the EU and IMF.

If Greece remains in the Union, the chaos that results will also be used as a methodology of centralization. Either way, the powers-that-be plan to use chaos to consolidate more power for world government.

Here’s hoping the average Europeans see the trap for what it is. Chaos there will be, but the antidote is not a stronger European Union but a weaker one.

And the antidote is not a stronger (if smaller) euro but the removal of the currency entirely.

And the antidote is not a stronger, regnant IMF but a reduction in its powers in Europe and around the world.

This is the TRUE choice. It is not between economic chaos and stronger EU/globalist facilities (as the globalist elites wish to frame it) but between further authoritarianism and freedom.

Let us hope the Internet, a tool that has increasingly shown us the Way the World Really Works helps expose this elite dialectic. Let us hope the increasingly tortured masses of Europe fully realize their manipulation and make a better choice.

In fact, there is only one choice. Throw off the European Union and its euro and regain sovereignty. That would be a start.

A.M Freyed, Infowars

Britain’s Ministry of Defense confirmed the US-made long range acoustic device, spotted attached to a landing craft on the Thames River, will be available for use in the summer games.

The LRAD 1000Xi is “an effective long range communications system that broadcasts focused highly intelligible, multi-language messages, instructions and warnings over distances up to 3,000 meters (1.8 miles) to peacefully resolve uncertain situations, a spokesman for the San Diego-based LRAD Corp. said.

The corporation denies it is a weapon and the Ministry announced it would be used “primarily in the loud hailer mode”.

While some versions of the LRAD can produce painful, deafening sound levels of 150 decibels, they can also be used to broadcast verbal warnings such as ordering crowds to disperse, officials said.

The device, which has been used by the US Army for crowd control in Iraq, has also successfully been used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates.

“As part of the military contribution to the police-led security effort to ensure a safe and secure games, a broad range of assets and equipment is being used by our armed forces,” a Ministry of Defense spokesman said.

“This includes the LRAD, which will be deployed during the Olympic Games primarily to be used in the loud hailer mode as part of the measures to achieve a maritime stop on the Thames.”

Press TV

On May 10, the company announced that it is releasing a new QR (Quick Read) Code secured by nothing other than DNA. Without a doubt, this new product launch is yet another step toward the ultimate collection, databasing, and use of DNA by governments and corporations on a universal basis.

One quick note for those who are unaware of what a QR code is. QR codes are inked, coded diagrams that are recognizable by electronic scanners, often serving the same purpose as a barcode. These codes can be found on a wide variety of product packaging including the shipping labels used by companies like UPS.

In addition, QR Codes are sometimes used as a part of smartphone apps which require the user to scan a barcode.

If Applied DNA Sciences has anything to say about it, however, QR Codes will become much more than mere ink blots on paper. Indeed, instead of containing basic inventory or app-related information as they have in the past, QR Codes will also contain strands of botanical DNA, a possible precursor to a more invasive and “secure” method of identification, tracking, and tracing in the not so distant future.

The new product is called digitalDNA and it is described by Government Security News as being “a new security tool that utilizes the flexibility of mobile communications, the instant accessibility of secure, cloud-based data, and the absolute certainty of DNA to make item tracking and authentification fast, easy and definitive, while providing the opportunity to create a new and exciting customer interface.”
Apart from that glowing description however, digitalDNA is actually a forensic authentication technology or, one could also say, a biometric encoding/reading program. At the heart of the system is the physical “sequence encryption” of “botanical DNA markers” into the ink used to print the QR Code.

The pattern that results from the process, called a “rune,” can then be scanned using an Apple-approved app and an iPhone at any point during the shipping process.

The iPhone scan works by logging in to a “private, secure cloud” where it checks the DNA-based code it has just scanned with the one kept on file online in the Cloud. As GSN writes, “The tracking information is fed into ‘tunable algorithms’ that use pattern recognition to automatically identify supply chain risks, for counterfeits or product diversion.”

“Rapid-reading reporters,” which are closely linked with DNA markers, are physically present within the QR Code ink as well, and function as a means by which to prevent digital copying and phishing. As JGoodwin of GSN writes, “The un-copyable, botanically-derived DNA markers included in all digitalDNA codes serve as a forensic backstop in legal cases where absolute proof of originality is required.

Forensic authentication of the DNA in the ink must match the sequences and length polymorphism found in the decrypted digitalDNA code.”

GSN continues, “The ubiquity of the iPhone platform allows the consumer to participate in the authentication scheme, quickly and easily. In addition, end-users could confirm freshness and expiration, connect to real-time or video technical support, identify local resources, easily place re-orders, and participate in peer-to-peer selling.”

This recently introduced technology allegedly developed out of a partnership that was established on January 25 between Applied DNA Sciences and DivineRune Inc., a company that specializes in cloud computing.

However, with the announcement of the digitalDNA program made on May 10, after only four months of partnership, one might be justified in wondering whether or not this system was developed long before the financial agreement made between the two companies was divulged to the public.

Indeed, four months is a very short time to forge corporate partnerships as well as envision, develop, and release a product like digitalDNA. Particularly, one that potentially has such fundamental implications for privacy if it is expanded to include human DNA in the future.

Both companies, in a joint statement, described the partnership as “taking APDN’s best-in-class anti-counterfeiting and authentication systems and marrying them to the best in secure mobile applications and advanced cloud computing.”

A similar product, Our Signature DNA, is in the pilot stages of military usage in compliance with Section 818 of the National Defense Authorization Act which mandates that defense manufacturers and suppliers take further steps to end counterfeiting within the supply chain.

However, digitalDNA is not necessarily for military use but for civilian purposes. Although the companies are much more vague about just what avenues they expect their new product to take, the fact is that they have a market in the waiting in many different areas; most notably in California where the E-Pedigree Law, which requires an electronic record of all sales of prescription drugs in the state, would fit perfectly with such a system.

While the digitalDNA program will be using botanical (plant) DNA for now, one must question whether or not this is merely a precursor to the use of actual human DNA for purposes of identification and verification.

Such a system is by no means outside the realm of possibility as iris, palm, and even vein scanners have been proposed in the past as reliable methods of identification and authentication.

Voice and facial recognition have also been introduced at the commercial level for the same purpose. So it is quite logical to assume that very soon individual DNA might be accepted as verification for payment or other functions.

Going one step further, one might also be justifiably concerned about whether or not this “new and improved” method of payment would then, like all the others, eventually become mandatory.

Much like the situation currently unfolding in India where all 1.2 billion residents are having their faces photographed, fingerprints taken, and iris’ scanned under the name of more secure and efficient distribution of services, we can easily see how such a justification might be used in the United States for a national database of private information, even including DNA, on every American citizen.

After all, the Secure Communities program, along with IDENT and NGI were first rolled out under the guise of reducing illegal immigration, but are now slowly being applied to American citizens.

Admittedly, such a scenario is moving much further ahead than anything the digital DNA program currently entails. However, given how technologies, particularly those that can eventually be used to reduce personal freedom and anonymity, are often introduced in individual increments, it would be wise not to lose sight of the direction in which this new system is moving.

Dr. James Hayward, President and CEO of APDN has stated that “digitalDNA could revolutionize supply chain security.” This much is not really debatable. However, the question is just how far this revolution will go and what the ramifications of it will be in regards to the privacy of the average person if it progresses to the logical next stage of including human DNA.

Associated Press

­“We have seen many examples of infringements on sovereignty in the recent years. Just remember military operations against foreign countries in violation of UN resolutions, statements that this or that regime has lost legitimacy – by the way, from the point of view of a foreign state rather than the people in question – as well as introduction of sanctions bypassing international organizations,” Medvedev stated at the International Legal Forum in St. Petersburg.

He specifically stressed that United Nations, although not perfect, is the only tool in the settlement of conflicts for the international community.

“We have no other platform, even though some may not like it. It is the UN Charter that calls for respecting the supremacy of law and sovereignty of states,” Medvedev pointed out.

He went on to say that hasty military operations usually end up with radicals coming to power.

The premier added that those issues, including the situation around Syria and nuclear security, will be discussed at the G8 summit in Camp David on May 18-19.

RT

Are you for growth or austerity? Do you sympathise with the Greeks, or regard them as getting what they deserve? If you disagree with something you read, do you ever change your mind, or do you shout rubbish and chuck it in the bin? Since the days of Socrates, civilisation has honed the art of reason to resolve conflict and deliver harmony. Yet people of like background and education can disagree about everything. Why?

I sometimes wonder that I write for the Guardian when what I say seems to anger so many readers. Most people buy a newspaper not to be prised from their settled opinion but to find it confirmed and comforted. They would not be dragged from it by wild horses, let alone the old nag of reason. A newspaper is their tribal notice board, their badge, their identity.

Nor is that all. Tribes of left and right tend to buy the shop. They take their politics table d’hôte, not à la carte. Those on the left are for more public spending, higher taxes, no war and a tolerance of scroungers, those on the right the exact reverse.

Once they have opted for Labour or Conservative (or the obscure freemasonry of liberal democracy), they surrender their political virginity to the party line, lie back and enjoy it – usually for life.

I have a problem with this. I opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars, would abolish Trident, end prison for nonviolent offenders and legalise drugs. But I support the government on NHS reform, students fees and targeting social benefits. I am a UN-enthusiast, but an aid sceptic. Gays should enjoy full civil rights but I find ethnic minorities over-cosseted. All this I regard as a coherent political outlook.

Not many others do. Friends and acquaintances find my portfolio of views either mischievous or mad, and mutter darkly about my probable need of treatment. Dear Abby, are they right?

At last we have some help. It is from the American political scientist, Jonathan Haidt, and his fascinating voyage of discovery through the social psychology of politics, The Righteous Mind. Haidt, a lifelong liberal, was baffled at why so many poor and working-class voters kept supporting conservative politicians when it was clearly against their interest.

Haidt’s answer is not just that politics is seldom purely about money. Conservatives are also more in touch with what he calls the “taste buds” of politics. They understand human intuition. They score on such emotions as loyalty to the nation or group, desire for security and authority and a concern for religious and moral purity. Liberals cover just two bases, a sense of fairness and compassion for strangers, thus missing out on a large chunk of human intuition and concern.

Above all, they rely too much on an appeal to reason.

To Haidt, reason is not how people wrestle with a problem to find a path to the right answer. That was for the Greeks (the ancient ones). Reason is rather a weapon we deploy to persuade others that we are right, and they use to prove us wrong. It is not a coming together but a driving apart. As David Hume observed, reason is subordinate to the passions. It rides into battle on the elephant of intuition.

Hence the advice of modern political tacticians, that politicians should always “talk to the elephant first”. Conservatives are good at talking to elephants.

So what determines these dominant intuitions, that they are so resistant to reason? Psychologists now believe that we owe our political views not to any argued programme, but to some gene pool or acquired tribal loyalty, parental, territorial, educational or occupational. It is part nature, part nurture. Loyalty to a profession can be as fanatical as to a family: most lawyers, doctors, soldiers and scientists in my experience believe their profession can do no wrong (unlike, of course, journalists).

This may seem a mere updating of WS Gilbert’s cry that “every boy and every gal” is delivered into the world “either a little liberal or a little conservative”. But what to Gilbert may have seemed a random attractor of Victorian politics is, in modern America, leading to an increasingly furious polarisation.

To many foreigners, America seems a land divided between hysterias, driven apart by round-the-clock news and opinion, in which information inflames rather than calms preconceived opinion.

Studies suggest these political divergences may lie far deeper than we think, in our neurological pathways. Even in mild-mannered Britain, such cross-border adventures as red Tories and blue Labour gain little traction. Opinions reflect insecurity and fear of the unknown: as when America lurched to the patriotic and illiberal right after 9/11.

In some American cities, the sociologist Bill Bishop has noted (in The Big Sort) that polarisation is producing a “political ethnic cleansing” as people find they cannot live near others of different views. If political attitudes are becoming that neurotic, it is doubly tragic that people live apart. A cartoon shows a divorcing father explaining to his child, “It is because I want what is best for the country and your mother doesn’t.”

Yet Haidt offers me only limited help. Whatever intuition he thinks holds me in thrall remains a mystery to me. I believe – as do most people – that I approach any political issue with an open mind, driving towards it in the chariot of reason. I think I can see tribal bigotry at a hundred paces and can fell it with a Socratic blow.

I can only assume that Haidt is roaring with laughter, that somewhere in his political anthropology he will unearth a tribe that laced my mother’s milk with scepticism and programmed me to a contrarian view of life.

These debates always turn into pleas for liberal tolerance, for a respect for other people’s opinions, drawing strength from Stephen Pinker’s thesis that, whatever else is amiss, the world is becoming a less violent place. But tolerance is itself a privilege of security. Intellectually it is appeasement.

I do not want to tolerate those who disagree with me, I want to persuade them they are wrong. Haidt may cry, “Why can’t we all just get along?” The answer is we can’t. The best we can do is not murder each other in the process.

The Guardian

America has crossed a landmark in its demographic make-up, presaging a monumental shift in the country’s culture, politics and economics, with minority groups for the first time in US history accounting for more than half of all births.

New figures released by the US census bureau underline the changing face of the world’s only superpower. They show that most children born between July 2010 and July 2011 belonged to ethnic or racial minorities, with Hispanic families driving the demographic growth.

Within that year, 1.98 million non-Hispanic white babies were born – just below half of the 4m total of births. The proportion of white births – 49.6% in that period – has never before fallen below the halfway mark since the advent of large-scale European immigration to the US.

The milestone has been a long time coming, with key demographic trends leading up to it for at least two decades. But the bare fact that American children under the age of one are now more likely numerically to be Hispanic, black or Asian than they are to be white still constitutes a moment of enormous significance.

“When you have more than half the births within minority groups, that sets the stage for huge change in this country,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution who divined the crucial statistic from a new stack of census data. “It means that before long young adults in America will look dramatically different from those who came before.”

At the centre of the shift is the growing gulf in fertility rates between white Americans and their minority compatriots, which is leading to an ageing white population while young Americans are becoming increasingly diverse.

The transformation is most visible in four states – California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas – that already can claim to be “majority-minority”, having more than 50% of their populations drawn from minority groups.

But the metamorphosis is touching all parts of the country. Between 2000 and 2010, the proportion of children under 18 who were non-Hispanic white declined in all but four states – North and South Carolina, Idaho and Utah – while the equivalent proportion of Hispanic children increased in every one of the 50 states.

“Increasingly, the children of America are minority children. The future of this country will to a great extent be tied to its minority population,” said Steve Murdock, a sociology professor at Rice University in Texas and former head of the US census bureau.

From that seimic shift will flow profound consequences to which the country’s leaders are only now waking up. For a start, the highly fraught political debate over illegal immigration into the US across the Mexican border appears in this light to be so wide of the mark as to be almost irrelevant.

Two-thirds of the growth in the Hispanic population comes from births rather than migration, and under US laws each of the more than 1 million babies born to Latina mothers in 2010/11 are full US citizens.

“People look at the growing Hispanic population in the US and they often equate that with illegal immigration, but that’s not the case anymore,” Frey said.

In a year in which the race for the White House could be determined in a handful of swing states with large Hispanic populations, from Colorado to Florida, the potential electoral impact of the demographic movement is also profound.

Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency could suffer from the hardline anti-illegal immigration posture he took in the primary stage of the race. He has been making visible efforts to soften his stance, campaigning recently alongside Florida’s Latino senator Marco Rubio.

Party politics aside, America’s policy makers face daunting challenges ahead. There is a mounting gulf between older Americans, who are disproportionately white, and younger Americans, who are increasingly Hispanic, black and Asian – a population rift that could lead to tension over how to distribute scarce public resources.

Murdock points out that historical discrimination in the US, including black slavery and discrimination towards Hispanics, has contributed towards huge disparities in income and educational levels.

Poverty rates are about three times as high for African Americans and Hispanics as they are for whites, while a shocking 40% of adult Hispanics ended their education before they reached high school. In the past, these socio-economic problems could be brushed under the carpet as relatively marginal incumbrances, but now they are marching their way to the front and centre of US society.

“This is the ultimate American challenge,” Murdock said. “We have to ensure that all Americans have the education and skills they need to be competitive, not just for their own good but for the good of the nation as a whole.”

The Guardian

According to a report from Georgia’s WRBL, the Pentagon is offering 14,000 combat-related roles to women. Before, women were excluded from positions if they were too close or directly involved in combat.

Not so surprisingly, this news comes about a month after Katy Perry released her “Part of Me” video, an obvious piece of propaganda deployed to depict the army as a receptive haven for desperate women.

As disheartening as this may be to some, the video’s message was not to empower women.

As Alex predicted, it was all propaganda designed to get everybody ready for women on the front lines.

In the video below, Alex expresses how Katy Perry will likely be relaxing in her mansion sipping wine while women who were duped by her recruitment video fight lice infestations, get injected with poisonous vaccines, and are used as camp prostitutes.

If “camp prostitutes” sounds like we’re going a bit too far, one need look no further than the case of Pvt. LaVena Johnson who was raped, burned, and murdered on her own military base.

This female recruitment announcement is the Pentagon’s latest effort to advance the military industrial complex’s agenda all while instituting a collapse of the basic family home structure.

In 2003, we found the Pentagon engaged in another female Psy-Op in which the Military Times came out touting Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s Iraqi capture as “heroic,” alleging she put up quite a fight, completely unloading her M-16 rifle. It was later revealed that she never fired a single round.

What’s worse is that Perry’s man-hating video depicts the army as an escape from our male-dominated society, when in actuality the army is almost fully dominated by men.

This type of propaganda is reminiscent of Edward Bernay’s 1929 tobacco industry campaign – a stunt designed to attract and addict females to cancer-causing cigarettes all while expanding the cigarette manufacturers’ market.

It is strongly encouraged that anyone interested in becoming part of the industrial war machine known as the army do research prior to enlisting. Despite their exhaustive advertisements showing women in the army to be all-powerful, you can rest assured that this is just another government Psy-Op designed to bring down the core of the traditional family structure.

Adan Salazar, Infowars

Lured by the prospect of reducing oil dependence, President Obama’s ambivalent approach has ultimately yielded ground to industry. Lured by the same prospect, countries all around the world have joined the shale-gas craze, and many use the fact that the U.S. has been “fracking” as proof that it is safe. William Engdahl provides the full picture.

There is a global rush to embrace a new source of extracting hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of gas.

A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU.

The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate simply lacks the geology where substantial shale rock is present.

Even in Germany some cash-strapped states are seriously looking at Shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company is planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia region.

The company’s head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen in a recent interview stated, “Germany is most definitely an interesting market. We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas.” ExxonMobil estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany’s 16 states.

The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years’ total consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas bonanza.

Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF’s Wintershall, Gaz de France, BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell are salivating over German shale gas prospects.

The Polish government is in a state of near euphoria over the prospects of exploiting its shale gas resources. Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls shale gas Poland’s “great chance,” because it could cut its dependence on Russian gas, create tens of thousands of jobs and fill state coffers.

In tests at one well in northern Poland done last August, the Polish Geological Institute claimed that Hydraulic fracturing didn’t affect the quality or quantity of surface and ground water and didn’t cause tremors that would pose a threat to buildings or other infrastructure. The US oilfield services giant Schlumberger did the fracking.

Of course one test in one well is hardly conclusive, though the Tusk government doesn’t seem to care as they push Brussels to launch a major Polish shale gas exploitation program.

In China, shale gas looks about to take off as a major new focus for the country’s enormous energy requirements. The governing State Council has recently approved shale gas as an “independent mineral resource” and the Ministry of Land and Resources will conduct an appraisal of shale gas resources this year to expedite discovery and development of China shale deposits.

Until now China’s rough mountainous terrain and lack of shale gas fracking know-how has kept it out of the shale gas, with coal far the major source of electric power. The French oil giant, Total, has just signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to produce shale gas in China.

China has around 31 trillion cubic meters of natural gas trapped in shale, some 50% greater than the United States according to the US Department of Energy estimate.  These are volumes to make the head of any respectable state official spin.

One exception to the shale gas rush is Germany where the Federal Government just decided to prohibit ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, from fracking in the eastern part of the country, stating they were “very skeptical” of industry claims it would not poison ground water or cause earthquake damage.

Myth and reality: The Halliburton Loophole

Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic fracking? One answer is the record high oil and gas prices of the recent few years have made the costly fracking profitable.

The second reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.

But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials — unchecked — directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.

The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was introduced on massive lobbying pressure from the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids—Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy.

Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed, Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been called “scientifically unsound” by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson.

In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson’s complaints.

The Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.”

The Halliburton Loophole is no minor affair. The process of hydraulic fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and of some of the most toxic chemicals known.

During the uproar over the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on Shale Gas. Their report was released in November 2011. It was what could only be called a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.

The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deuss. Deuss sits on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family.

He also sits on the board of Schlumberger, along with Halliburton, the major company doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven panel members, six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deuss report called shale gas, “the best piece of news about energy in the last 50 years.” Deuss added, “Over the long term it has the potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States.”

In the US oil industry people have forgotten the scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production.

The reason is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, made financially lucrative with the advent of $100 a barrel oil since 2008.

Reportedly under pressure from then Vice President Cheney, chemical or hydraulic fracking of shale rock and coal beds has been left unregulated under what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole in the 2005 US National Energy Bill.

To access the gas, the shale needs to be fractured using a mixture of hot water, sand and chemical additives, some of which are highly poisonous. Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence.

The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.”  This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and eat it too.

They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation like other chemical companies?
Fracking toxic waste

To understand what is going on, in a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length.

As one expert described the fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done, “you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives.

The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas.

It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force—more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch—that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.”

The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals — including benzene — is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.

Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken, oil. It floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, PhD, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers.

These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.”

Not only possibly poisoning the fresh water underground aquifers, hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011, following two earthquakes—one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27 May.

A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released in April concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes. Earthquake activity in fracking regions across the US have also been reported.

Alarmingly, in the case of exploiting shale gas in China, the largest shale formation lies in Sechuan Province in China’s east, one of the most active earthquake zones in Asia. Additionally, given the documented dangers to ground water from extensive fracking, China’s chronic water shortages are threatened as well.

The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.

But the largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia into upstate New York, estimated estimated to hold as much gas as the whole United States consumes in a century. More recent estimates put the figure at half that or lower, suggesting the energy industry is using hype to promote its methods.
Good news bad news

Good news is shale gas shows how wrong the peak oil lobby is about depletion of global hydrocarbons. Gas like coal and oil are according to their definition all “fossil fuels.”

While we leave aside whether in fact they are from dinosaur detritus or fossilized algae, clearly the Earth is far from peaking in its hydrocarbon resources. Bad news is diverting valuable resources from finding abundant conventional gas or oil using advanced new methods.

F. William Engdahl , voltairenet

­Nasrallah’s film is in the running for the Golden Palm award at the Cannes International Film Festival, known for screening politicized films, among others.

“A number of great Israeli directors are my friends, such as Avi Mograbi and Amos Gitaï. But it’s not me who decides whether the films should be sold to Israel or not,” added the director who made 6 films in 20 years.
Nasrallah is known for bringing political context to the screen. In 2004, he made Gate of Sun, a drama about the history of Palestinian fighters.

“I don’t think that while the Egyptians are still in their first stage moving towards liberation from their own regime, from oppression and military governance, Israel would be an ally in favor of such liberation,” the 60-year-old movie maker told the media conference at the world’s most far-reaching festival.

After the Battle brings to the silver screen the bloody aftermath of the Arab Spring, when Tahrir Square in Cairo became the volcanic epicenter of a revolt that led to the ousting of long-term Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak.
Egyptian protesters clash with riot police along a road which leads to the Interior Ministry, near Tahrir Square, in Cairo on November 23, 2011 (AFP Photo / Mahmud Hams)

The film’s director had himself spent much time in Tahrir Square during the crucial events. He witnessed what he described as “the euphoria of the people and their excitement.”

The process of shooting the movie was affected by real-life events. Actors also discussed the situation with residents of Nazker El-Samman, a village at the foot of the Giza pyramids and home to some 50,000 people. A number of them had their say in Nasrallah’s drama. It took the Cairo-born director 48 days to shoot After the Battle, which has a documentary feel about it.

Last January, on National Police Day, tens of thousands of Egyptians took part in peaceful demonstrations against Mubarak’s regime. The police dispersed the protesters using tear gas and water cannons. In the wake of the “one million march” Mubarak announced he would not run in the next presidential election. On February 2, the notorious Battle of the Camels took place when pro-Mubarak forces attacked the protesters, provoking a series of violent confrontations.

RT

Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, stated “Look, I support that position. We support it as the labor movement because of discrimination.” He explained, “There are 1,128 obligations and benefits you get from being married, responsibilities and obligations, as well as some benefits.

We think that everybody ought to be treated equally. So it’s marriage equality we’re looking at, and people shouldn’t be discriminated against.”

While many union members likely disagree with Trumka’s stance, support of same sex marriage and all civil rights is the only position that is consistent with the interests of working people as a whole.

Though unions are generally focused on better wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, they cannot take effective action for these needs without building broad unity among all workers regardless of race, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. Consequently, since the mass efforts of the LGBT community have galvanized around the issue of marriage equality, the union movement needs to get behind it.

For LGBT workers, this issue is as central to their lives as their working conditions. For those workers who are currently opposed to same sex marriage, they need to learn that they are better able to struggle for improvements in their lives if they are united with their gay brothers and sisters. Given the bipartisan attacks against workers, they cannot afford to let their prejudices get in the way.

Nevertheless, the uncritical praise for President Obama’s remarks create the impression that they have been more motivated to getting him re-elected than as commitment to LGBT equality. This is because Obama’s remarks fell far short from the step forward for which they are being touted. In fact, politically they are a step backwards. The President did not say he considered marriage equality a civil right.

Moreover, he made it a point of stating that he considered the matter of same sex marriage best decided on a state-by-state basis. This has been the fall back position for every two-faced faker in civil rights’ struggles from the days of slavery and Jim Crow to Roe v. Wade. In other words this means that Obama condones discrimination where bigots have the political upper hand.

President Obama’s advocating of a state-by-state approach towards marriage equality undermines the efforts of those who are fighting for it as a constitutional civil rights issue. Jim Cook, in his article “Barack Obama’s Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement” explains:

“There are currently at least three cases winding their way toward federal courts that address the issue of whether (among other things) the equal protection clause of the constitution guarantees gay men and women the same access to marriage rights as heterosexual men and women

— the Proposition 8 case, in which David Boies and Ted Olson challenged California’s ban on gay marriage, and several challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which bars gay men and women from receiving federal marriage benefits and allows states to refuse to recognize valid gay marriages.

Obama’s Justice Department has admirably declined to defend the constitutionality of DOMA. But the position he enunciated today is in opposition to Boies and Olson: Obama is saying that if he were a judge, he would have rejected Boies and Olson’s constitutional arguments and affirmed the right of Californians to enshrine bigotry in their state constitution.”

Experience has shown that this president’s “support” for progressive measures results in, at best, political inaction. Union leaders certainly must remember Obama’s “support” for the Employee Free Choice Act (card check) and other pro-worker measures he promised during his campaign and dropped once elected.

For them to uncritically line up behind Obama’s comments on same sex marriage, without clarifying that they consider it a civil rights issue in opposition to the President’s state-by-state approach, makes them look, at best, foolish, at worst, insincere.

It is perhaps hoped by those moved to uncritical support of Obama’s comments to encourage his “evolution” on same sex marriage towards political action that he currently opposes. However, in the realm of politics, such changes are more determined by the movement of social forces than by personal appeals and clever statesmanship.

In other words, the LGBT community and their supporters in Labor must not blunt their struggle for marriage equality in the hope of appealing to the good conscience of corporate politicians and not making too much trouble. They must continue the fight through independent mass action and educating their worker brothers and sisters who currently do not understand the issue of marriage equality.

The best way of educating on a mass level is through common struggle. This was vividly demonstrated in 1974 in a Teamster Local 888 conflict with Coors Brewing Company.

After settling a five-month strike, Coors remained the sole distributor that refused to sign the new contract. Local 888 President Allan Baird realized that his union did not have the ability to win on their own without the active support of the LGBT community in San Francisco. He met with Harvey Milk, who was a rising openly gay activist in the city, hoping to get support for a boycott of Coors.

Milk’s only condition was that the Teamsters begin to hire openly gay drivers. Baird agreed and the union began to hold true to its promise within a week, beginning a city-wide boycott that lasted three years, uniting the interests of the Teamsters and the San Francisco LGBT working class community.

This struggle demonstrates how workers are educated in mass action about the need to overcome anti-gay prejudices in order to win as a class. It also suggests, in miniature, the approach labor leaders can take today that will strengthen the fight for marriage equality. In 1974 the main issue for the Teamsters was to settle the contract fight with Coors.

This lead them to start a form of union-conducted affirmative action in the hiring of openly gay workers. Today, the main issues workers are facing are the need for a real jobs program and the need to stop cuts to such public services as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and education by taxing the rich.

If the labor movement conducts such a struggle through mass action, independent of the corporate two party system, the need for unity will become apparent. This will create more fertile ground for winning marriage equality for the LGBT community than any presidential campaign statements.

Mark Vorpahl, Infowars